6 People Who Turned the Tables on Government Surveillance

Call us old-fashioned, but if you're going to go through the trouble of spying on your enemy, you might as well do your homework: buy some good equipment, get a background check, borrow a trench coat, etc. What you don't want to do is half-ass something that can end up getting you and your country into a heap of trouble. After all, it's a fine line between being a badass spy and being a wacky bumbling spy character played by Kevin James.

#6. The CIA Can't Tell the Difference Between Lesbians and Dog Lovers

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Let us tell you about the time the CIA got involved in a slapstick misunderstanding that would have been considered too goofy for an episode of Frasier.

The whole ridiculous thing started when, in the 1990s, the CIA wound up spying (in a roundabout way) on one of America's own ambassadors. That's not the misunderstanding -- they were doing that on purpose. What, you thought the CIA only spied on enemies? Foreign affairs are more complicated than that, we're afraid.

Photos.com"She's on to us! Pretend you're stargazing."

At the time, there was a civil war in Guatemala. The U.S. was backing the government, and that government did some pretty awful things (during the war, 200,000 people were killed, and over 40,000 disappeared). However, America's ambassador to Guatemala, Marilyn McAfee, was pretty free about criticizing said government. The government that was backed by the CIA.

So, at one point a Guatemalan colonel ordered the Guatemalan Intelligence Service (GIS) to bug McAfee's office in the hope of digging up some dirt on her that he could then use to curry favor with his CIA handler. And he got his dirt: evidence that the married McAfee was having a lesbian affair. At one point they heard her say, "Oh, Murphy ... I love you. Give me some kisses. You're such a bad girl ..." Note that that McAfee's secretary was a lady named Carol Murphy. Busted!

The colonel relayed the evidence of this scandalous situation to his friends at the CIA. The agency began deeply investigating McAfee's life, recording a detailed log of both McAfee and Murphy's movements. The CIA station chief then confronted McAfee about it, and she was confused, to say the least.

See, in the course of their investigation, the CIA happened to somehow miss certain other details about McAfee's life, like how she owned a small poodle that was also named Murphy.

Photos.comGod, no, you disgusting freak! Wait, she was just ... Oooooohhh, OK.

#5. Student Finds GPS Device on Car, FBI Demands It Back

Imagine you take your car to the shop for an oil change. As the car is raised, you notice an odd wire sticking out from the bottom. Upon closer inspection, you see it is part of a device attached to your car, a device that includes a big metal tube-shaped container and transmitter. That's weird. Do you:

A. Shit your pants because you think it's a pipe bomb.

B. Ask the mechanic to pull it off your car, then take pictures and upload them to Reddit asking for advice.

Photos.com"Sorry, officer, but this is one of those rare 'you wish' moments."

If you're 20-year-old American college student Yasir Afifi, you choose B. Which was a brave choice, considering his deceased father was a Muslim community leader, he logs a lot of flight time making frequent trips to the Middle East and his stoned-off-their-asses friends thought it was a bomb for sure. Try picturing the cast of Half-Baked as you read the Reddit post and you get a sense of how bizarre the situation seemed. By the way, this was what they were looking at:

Via Reddit"I've seen one in my mom's underwear drawer. Does that mean she's being tracked, too?"

Within a very short amount of time, the world's most trustworthy source of information (aka Internet users) identified the gizmo as a Guardian ST820, a tracking device sold exclusively to law enforcement agencies. And if you're wondering, yes, law enforcement agencies could, at the time, legally implant tracking devices without a warrant. But more on that in a moment.

So in October 2010, Yasir Afifi had some kind of GPS gizmo on his hands -- one that he knew was placed there by someone in some kind of authority. He did what any 20-year-old college student would do -- he considered selling it on Craigslist. But before he got the chance, he was confronted with half a dozen FBI agents at his apartment complex. They wanted their GPS tracker back, please.

Via Reddit"Trust me, you wouldn't want it back if you knew where it's been."

Without even a hint of embarrassment at their own incompetence, the agents indicated that Afifi had been under surveillance for three to six months, and that they knew he had a new job and that he was going to Dubai in a few weeks. Then they asked a gaggle of questions -- did he know anyone who was traveling to Yemen, was he friends with anybody undergoing military training, was the friend who posted the pictures on Reddit a straight up terrorist? And then they giggled and told him he didn't need to call his lawyer, saying "Don't worry, you're boring." Case closed!

Two side notes: One, Yasir Afifi hooked himself right up with the ACLU and sued the federal government over the whole ordeal. And two, in January 2012 the Supreme Court ruled (in a different case) that, yes, from now on police need a warrant before placing a tracking device on a suspect.

Photos.com"That's strange. According to this, he's just been sitting on the side of the highway for six days."

#4. Operation Igloo White

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Let's play a game. Imagine that we're Cracked.com and you're the leader in charge of American forces in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. (We never said it would be a fun game.)

Here's your problem: The enemy army in North Vietnam is trucking supplies and soldiers into South Vietnam via a road called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And this "road" isn't an asphalt highway featuring access roads and exit ramps where you can easily set up a roadblock to thwart Charlie. It runs through the jungles of Laos, Cambodia and both Vietnams, and by 1973 the entire road was under canopy. Meaning whole convoys of commies could get from one end to the other without detection from the air. So, you're in charge of stopping them. What are you going to do about it?

Sabotage, baby.

If you're Secretary of State Robert S. McNamara, you're going to get $1.7 billion worth of electronic sensors up in that shit. During Operation Igloo White, over 20,000 acoustic and seismic sensors were airdropped along the road and monitored by orbiting aircraft 24 hours a day. When the sensors detected a target, an alarm would be triggered at headquarters and planes would be given the coordinates, and then they'd level the area with bombs. There is no way this could ever possibly go wrong. And in fact the operation reported destroying 35,000 North Vietnamese trucks! Good job, guys!

Except not exactly. The results seemed a little too good -- for instance, the Air Force's own numbers estimated there weren't that many trucks in North Vietnam, period, much less clogging the path of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And there was scant evidence of the aftermath of all of these successfully bombed targets. So what was the deal?

Photos.com"We're just gonna go ahead and round this one up to 35,000 and call it a day."

The deal was that the North Vietnamese weren't idiots. They discovered the sensors, messed with them to make them go off and ran away giggling while the Americans scrambled to bomb that spot. Specifically, the enemy soldiers were playing tape recorded truck noises or driving empty vehicles along the road as decoys. Some of the sensors were designed to detect bodies, like through sweat or urine, so the Vietnamese just threw bags of pee around to confuse them.

It worked. Oh, and it didn't help that the sensors couldn't tell the difference between a commie soldier and, say, a frog.

Guess how long it took the Americans to figure out their sensors were recording frog croaks, decoy trucks, urine bags and vacationing noncombatant Vietnamese people? Five years. And $1.7 billion.